IRVING: Well, yes, they’re all fathers of my work, in a way. The polite world calls them extremists, but I think they are very truthful, very accurate. I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range. They are all disturbed—both comically and tragically—by who the victims of a society (or of each other) are. You can’t copy that; you can only agree with it.